The legal affairs committee of the European Parliament will vote today on Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda’s controversial copyright report.
The report is not legislatively binding, but will contribute to the debate surrounding forthcoming copyright reforms. A new draft law is expected to be proposed by Digi Commissioner Gunther "H- …

Update
An Indian security blogger was hit with a gagging order by an Israeli firm after he linked its technology to a sneaky ad injection by his ISP.
Thejesh GN, an activist and programmer, got into legal hot water after he alleged that Airtel 3G was injecting JavaScript and iFrames into mobile browsing sessions. This JavaScript …

Microsoft's top legal eagle is standing firmly against the US government's attempts to force it to hand over users' data stored outside the US.
In a blog post, Microsoft’s general counsel and exec veep Brad Smith said that he believes the law is on the company's side as it resists attempts to force it to turn over a customer’s …

A Hamburg court today ruled the use of ad blocking is legal following a case brought against Adblock Plus by a group of German publishers.
The defendant in the four-month trial was Eyeo GmbH, the company that owns Adblock Plus.
The lawsuit claimed the company should not be allowed to block ads on websites owned by the …

MicroTechnologies, a reseller caught up in the long running HP/Autonomy legal battle, has itself fired a legal salvo at the US behemoth. MicroTech claims it is owed millions of dollars for software that was paid for but never delivered.
MicroTech was named in HP’s claims against former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, saying that he …

Austrian Facebook-botherer-in-chief Max Schrems says the US social network appears to be saying its users are either too young or too insane to file a class-action lawsuit against it.
In August, Schrems filed a legal complaint in Austria against Facebook with a long list of alleged violations of EU privacy laws. Some 25,000 FB …

A proposed "electronic interference" code for spooks will sanction pervasive hacking powers without judicial or parliamentary scrutiny, experts and campaigners have warned.
The government slipped out its consultation documents on "equipment interference" and "interception of communications" last month – on the same day the …

Google has avoided a costly legal precedent by settling out of court in an online abuse case due to be heard in the High Court today, legal experts have said.
Daniel Hegglin was seeking an injunction to force Google to block all traces in its search results of online abuse against him, following a defamatory anonymous campaign …

Alibaba's initial public offering legal bill has swelled to $15.8m.
As noted by Reuters, that's six times the amount paid by Facebook ($2.6m) when it prepared to float onto Wall Street in May 2012.
The Chinese e-commerce giant disclosed its big $15.8m payout to lawyers in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission …

File-sharing kingpin and self-described pauper Kim Dotcom will need to cough up another NZ$35,000 ($26,900) after losing the latest round of his long-running legal battle before the country's Supreme Court.
The sum will go to cover the New Zealand government's costs to defend warrants that were issued for searches of properties …

Apple may end up getting a helping hand from its mega smartphone rival Samsung, after the South Korean electronics giant convinced US regulators to look at two Smartflash LLC patents.
In February, Cupertino was ordered to pay nearly half a billion dollars to Texas-based patent licensing company Smartflash after a jury found that …

Steelie Neelie has warned Germany – for the fifth time – that if it doesn’t sort out its proposals on mobile termination rates, the Commission will take legal action.
The European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda may be on her way out, but Neelie Kroes has seemingly reached the end of her tether with the German telecoms …

80 legal experts have sent Google a to-do list on the first birthday of the so-called right to be forgotten.
A year ago this week, the European Court of Justice ruled that a Spanish national could force the search giant to remove links to outdated and irrelevant information about him – in his case a notice about an old mortgage …

Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has filed lawsuit in a Shanghai court claiming that three Chinese companies used social media to spread rumours it had produced a six-winged, eight-legged chicken.
Shanxi Weilukuang Technology Company, Taiyuan Zero Point Technology, and Yingchenanzhi Success and Culture Communication stand accused of …

Diablo Technologies, a supplier of Memory Channel Storage (MCS) that makes it possible to present flash disks as memory, says it has seen off a patent lawsuit from rival Netlist.
Netlist claimed Diablo pinched its technology, allowing the latter to get MCS to market faster. That rapid market entry, it's contended, meant Diablo …

Attempts by Brussels' Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding to rewrite Europe's 18-year-old data protection law ahead of 2014's EU elections took a significant knock on Friday, after a key tenet of the proposed rules faced surprise objections on human rights grounds.
The European Commission's vice president, who first tabled the …

Law firm Irwin Mitchell is to outsource IT operations to Esteem from Monday, with the “majority” of staff expected to be TUPEd across, although some are refusing to relocate 200 miles to the Woking call centre
The desktop support function was already contracted to Esteem at the end of 2012 for £1.7m with 15 people joining the …

The Swedish government has won its case to seize piratebay.se and thepiratebay.se, but the site is already back up under another domain with a new logo to show it isn't beaten.
The new round of whack-a-mole flared up on Tuesday when The Stockholm District Court ruled in a case brought by government prosecutors against Swedish …

In the aftermath of the massive hack attack on Sony Pictures – which the US government continues to insist was carried out by North Korea – President Barak Obama is expected to lobby hard for legislative overhauls to battle online threats.
He will reveal those proposals early next week, an unnamed White House spokesperson told …

Microsoft has launched its first US lawsuit against companies offering phoney phone support for its products and says it plans further operations in the UK and India to stamp out the scammers.
Fake tech support calls have been around for a few years now. A caller will claim to be calling from Microsoft technical support saying …

A US judge has ruled that warrantless electronic surveillance is legal when he upheld the terrorism conviction of an Oregon man.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was convicted of attempting to blow up a van he thought was full of explosives at a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, tried to get the ruling overturned because …

Consumer groups and two telcos have written to the government in support of Ofcom's attempts to revamp its appeals process and stop legal challenges from obstructing its rulings.
Which?, Consumer Futures, Three and TalkTalk have all signed a letter to culture secretary Maria Miller and business secretary Vince Cable that says …

A legal battle that threatened Samsung's stability has ended after company chairman Lee Kun-hee’s brother decided not appeal a court decision against him.
Older sibling Lee Maeng-hee ended the two year legal dispute over their inheritance by accepting a Seoul appeal court’s decision to reject his demand for a 940 billion won (US …

A court in New Zealand has ruled that the search warrant used in the arrest of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was legal, toppling a large part of his defence.
The warrant used to arrest Dotcom at his mansion two years ago, as well as to seize his laptops and hard drives was previously ruled illegal back in June 2012, after a …

In a court document filed on Thursday, Apple revealed that it has run up over $60m in billings by outside legal counsel in its patent-infringement battle against Samsung, with a goodly chunk of that owed to its lead legal team from the law firm of Morrison & Foerster.
"Under any measure, this was an exceptional case," Apple …

Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi, whose CEO models himself on Steve Jobs, has released a tablet the same size and shape as an iPad mini with the somewhat-derivative name Mi Pad.
Mi Pad Look familiar?
The Mi Pad has a 7.9-inch screen with a resolution of 2048-by-1536 – the same resolution as the iPad mini with Retina Display. It …

Somebody has been knocking a few heads together, it seems. Netlist’s flash tech shipping injunction stopping Diablo Tech’s business with SanDisk could be lifted – if settlement talks set for 12 February are successful.
Court documents for the case (Netlist, Inc v. Smart Modular Technologies, Inc) reveal that settlement …

The FBI wants greater authority to hack overseas computers, according to a law professor.
A Department of Justice proposal to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would make it easier for domestic law enforcement to hack into the computers of people attempting to protect their anonymity on the internet.
The …

Cloud, Big Data, the Internet of Things are among the hottest topics that vendors are driving in 2015, but there are five legal developments in each that are worth tracking.
1. Microsoft and US government go to court
Again, Microsoft is resisting attempts by the US government to get access to the user data it is holding outside …

The UK's Open Rights Group has revived the campaign to create a new HTTP error code to protest censorship.
The campaign to do so has burbled along for a few years, partly thanks to a Google employee named Tim Bray who created a draft for ”An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles ”. Bray has revised the draft a couple of …

Airbnb, the online home-rental marketplace, is in talks to raise funding from private equity firms that would value the company at a sturdy $10bn.
New York City's Manhattan skyline
Those kind of valuations are par for the course for today's net startups really, but it's still a strong vote of confidence for a company that's …

Hewlett-Packard seems poised to settle a lawsuit with shareholders over its $10.7bn purchase of Mike Lynch’s software company, Autonomy.
The computer company said in a statement that it is in “serious discussions” to settle the suit, brought in November 2012 by angry shareholders.
“No final deal has been reached yet,” HP said …

Apple will be investigated in Italy for allegedly owing almost £1bn to the Euro nation's taxman, it was claimed last night.
News agency Reuters quoted a unnamed judicial source who said the "checks on the size of the tax are under way".
Since the news broke last night, the fruity firm's spokeswoman Kristin Huguet has told Sky …

The detention and interrogation by British police of David Miranda, boyfriend of a journalist at the heart of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks furore, has been ruled to be legal by a British judge.
Miranda was stopped at Heathrow airport and interrogated for almost nine hours last August under anti-terrorism legislation while in …

Alex Salmond wasted £20,000 of public money trying to stop the Scottish Information Commissioner's Office from revealing that he'd not taken legal advice on a post-independence Scotland's eligibility for European Union membership.
The walrus-like Scottish National Party (SNP) leader used taxpayers' cash to fund a Court of …

The UK government secured the backing of the country's main political parties today to rush an emergency Data Retention and Investigation Powers Bill (DRIP) through Parliament just seven days before MPs break for summer recess.
It comes after communications providers and telcos who operate in Britain but have headquarters based …

Actor James Woods is suing a Twitter troll for wrongly branding him a "cocaine addict." Woods, who says he is not a drug addict, wants $10m in damages.
The Hollywood star's legal eagles have this week filed suit in the Los Angeles Superior Court against the whoever is behind the Twitter account "Abe List" over a July 15 tweet …

The Wilson Doctrine, long believed to forbid Blighty's spooks from tapping the phones of British politicians, has been repudiated by a senior lawyer.
Speaking to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which is hearing the complaint of a trio of politicians against GCHQ's mass-surveillance activities, James Eadie QC claimed …

HP employees have "withdrawn" legal action against the company and agreed to return to the negotiating table to hear CEO Meg Whitman's plan to cut 29,000 jobs.
The collective of HP workers, who are supported by numerous unions, sued the vendor and claimed it had not properly consulted staff and made the redundancy process …

Rebecca Richardson, the former Oracle employee who recently won a case against the company over sexual harassment committed by a former colleague, found out late last week that it was a pyrrhic victory after being hit with a monster legal bill.
Richardson's case against Oracle, which was liable for the actions of a harassing …

Content delivery network CloudFlare says it has received 50 court orders in the first half of this year, more than double that clocked in the whole of 2014.
The statistics, which do not include search warrants, were revealed in the web defender's latest transparency report show it received 22 court orders in the first half of …

Typo, the ill-fated iPhone keyboard startup backed by US media personality Ryan Seacrest, has agreed to discontinue much of its product line after settling a legal dispute with BlackBerry.
The struggling Canadian smartphone mogul said that it has agreed to a settlement with Typo that will see the accessory maker permanently shut …

Blogger Pamela Jones will shut down her award-winning legal news website Groklaw following revelations that the NSA is intercepting the world's internet communications.
Jones, also known as PJ, said in a final farewell article that the shutdown of encrypted email provider Lavabit, used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, had …

Uber has been hit with a CAN$400m (US$305m) lawsuit in Canada accusing the upstart of violating taxi laws.
The class-action suit, filed on behalf of cabbies in the Ontario province, claims Uber's dial-a-ride service operates as a fleet of illegal cabs, picking up people and taking money for journeys without obtaining proper …

Two Uber bosses have been talking to police in France after being accused of engaging in "illicit activity".
The men are reported to be Thibaud Simphal, the manager of Uber France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the general manager for Western Europe.
An Uber spokesman told The Register: "Two representatives of Uber today went …

Apple was this week hit with a number of patent infringement lawsuits regarding its sensors designs, Wi-Fi connectivity and even chirpy Siri.
The first legal challenge comes from a firm called DSS Technology Management, which claims Apple's iMac, Mac mini and the upcoming Mac Pro computers infringe two of its patents. Both …

One of the cofounders of music-sharing site Grooveshark has died.
The Gainesville Sun newspaper reports that the body of Josh Greenberg was found in his bed Sunday by his girlfriend.
The cause of death has not yet been determined, though the report says drug use and foul play are not believed to be involved. Greenberg was 28 …

A spat between the creators of Grand Theft Auto and the BBC has spilled over into a legal feud.
Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Rockstar Games, has filed suit against the UK broadcasting company over allegations of trademark infringement for its decision to cast a biopic about the games developer's history.
According to …

New changes to tax law in the city of Chicago have effectively raised the prices of online streaming and cloud services in the Windy City, beginning on Wednesday.
The Chicago Tribune reports that an update to the city's "amusement tax" adds a 9 per cent tax to Chicagoans' subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix and …

A ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on Thursday puts the onus on tech companies to prove that a product was not faulty at time of sale if it malfunctions in the first six months.
In the words of the ECJ: “Any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within six months of the delivery of goods is, in principle, to be …